UPDATE: The further adventures of Big Balls
The teenage founder of something called Tesla.Sexy LLC has access to our personal data, thanks to Musk
By Sam Bellamy
So, you’ve probably been wondering — how’s Big Balls doing these days?
Good and not so good.
Nineteen-year-old Edward Coristine, who chose that darling nickname for himself, is apparently still considered one of the darlings of DOGE. Last month, his mentor and enabler, Elon Musk, posted on the social media cesspool X that “Big Balls is awesome.”
But, as an unassailable as that employee review might be, there’s now another problem with the young fellow’s resume, which is already smeared with what appears to be beer and mustard as well as a whole lot of readily identifiable stupidity, arrogance and maliciousness.
Last week, reporter Raphael Satter at Reuters broke a story that Coristine “once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent.” The group also engaged in “swatting, the dangerous practice of making hoax emergency calls to send armed officers swarming targeted addresses.”
It’s doubtful this sort of thing would ever fall into the “youthful indiscretion” category, but it’s all the more worrisome because Big Balls — whose duties with DOGE have given him access to numerous government databases containing private information about U.S. citizens — is a "senior adviser" at the State Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
I recommend you read the non-paywall version of the story here. Reuters, by the way, is a worth the $1-a-week subscription — if you have any coins left over from the huge DOGE dividends or from Trump’s triumph over egg prices. (Seriously, though, they’re doing good work at Reuters. Big Balls, not so much.)
The following column by Sam Bellamy, headlined “Big Balls, Big Trouble,” appeared Feb. 26 at Fight the Fire.
If Big Balls was on my ballot at the local voting precinct last fall, I missed it. And I’m pretty sure I would have noticed.
Elected or not, the 19-year-old who carries that nickname, apparently with considerable pride, is a fairly powerful fellow in our nation’s capital.
Big Balls is part of Elon Musk’s army of little shavers scurrying into government offices, rifling through government computers and destroying our government, all before he’s of legal drinking age or – with the exception of Alabama and a few other places – old enough to rent a car.
The fellow’s given name is Edward Coristine, a Northeastern University dropout who worked briefly for Musk’s brain-implant company, Neuralink. He was also fired from an internship with a cybersecurity firm for allegedly leaking company secrets, according to Bloomberg News and others.
Coristine’s grandfather, according to freelance journalist Jacob Silverman, is the grandson of KGB officer Valery Fedorovich Martynov, who was executed in 1987 by the Soviet Union for acting as double agent for the United States following his recruitment by the FBI.
Those Russian roots run deep, apparently. Wired magazine reports that Big Balls, at age 15, founded a company called Tesla.Sexy LLC that “controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains. One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market.”
Coristine is also known to associate with a criminal hacking group and has solicited hacking services online, according to Wired.
All of this, of course, makes the youngster eminently qualified for a critical role in the Musk-Trump’s team’s Department of Government Efficiency.
I’ve not seen a clear explanation for his nickname, but let’s assume it has something to do with bravado and not an unpleasant condition that would require Big Balls to sit rather carefully at his computer. Because he does a lot of sitting at a computer.
According to The Washington Post, Coristine is listed in government directories as a “senior adviser” for the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA with additional positions with the Office of Personnel Management and what’s left of USAID. One gets the impression he’s in a lot of other places, too.
What he’s doing, exactly, isn’t clear because DOGE is notably veiled in secrecy, so much so that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt bizarrely refused to “reveal”—her word – the name of the agency’s administrator during a press briefing yesterday. The administration later deigned to reveal that Amy Gleason is the acting DOGE administrator.
What is known is that inexperienced people who’d ordinarily be rejected for a security clearance, like Coristine and Marko Elez, have access to sensitive government data and personal information about millions of Americans, with little oversight by responsible adults. And they’re contributing to major decisions about where our tax dollars go.
The oversight just grew smaller. Yesterday, 21 federal technology employees resigned in protest over the activities of the DOGE team, whose members are reportedly pressing for access to even more personal information about people like you and me.
“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” the resigning staff members said in a letter addressed to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”
Wiles, by the way, reportedly dislikes Musk’s unfettered access to Trump and has taken steps to limit his contact. Those steps do not appear to be working.
According to a recording obtained by CNN, executives at the cybersecurity firm where Coristine served as an intern had a heated argument in 2022 over whether he should be fired for suspicion of leaking proprietary information. The CEO, it appears, feared retaliation if they dismissed the kid, who was roughly 15 at the time.
After he was fired, Coristine boasted online that he retained access to the company’s computers months afterward. He also posted that he did “nothing contractually wrong” while employed there.
“Who the hell voted for Mr. Musk?” Paul Begala, a former advisor to President Clinton, recently asked on CNN. “Who the hell voted for – excuse the phrase – a guy who calls himself ‘Big Balls,’ a 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists? It's appalling.”
It is indeed.
When Coristine was replaced at the cybersecurity firm, the CEO sent a message to staff members encouraging them to welcome the new intern with this: “I hope you won’t be liquidated like your predecessor.”
Millions of Americans are hoping for a similar reprieve. But that’s not going to happen until Republicans in Congress find some courage, little or big, to stand up to Trump and Musk and shut down DOGE’s reckless and dangerous activities.